Faculty of philology department of english philology viktorija mi

1.2.The Literary Context of Modernism 
 
There is enough evidence to claim that modernist literature is an opening up of the world in all 
of its forms - theoretically, philosophically, aesthetically, and politically. As stated by the theorist 
Juri Talvet (1998:327), before Modernism, people treated life and art from the realistic perspective. 
In other words, philosophers and artists aimed to project the world in an objective fashion and to 
mimetically portray every detail in the way it was. Modernist writing, however, takes the reader into 
a world of unfamiliarity, a deep introspection, a cognitive thought-provoking experience, scepticism 
of religion, and openness to different cultural awareness, technology innovations, and rebellious 
ideas. Indeed, the most important characteristic of modern world literature may be its struggle with 
the failure of traditional sources of moral authority. Here I adhere to Chana Kronfeld’s remark that 
“Modernism can be defined as a dynamic semantic hierarchy”. (1996: 22) In Kronfeld’s opinion, it 
is obvious that modernist literature has inherited scepticism not only of revelation and traditional 
religious standards but also of reason and community consensus as sources of meaning. Indeed, 
Onega and Landa in their study support these statements and claim (1996: 69) that a typical modern 
writer describes a state of disconnectedness in which the individual lacks real belonging, has no 
ultimate purpose in life, and is controlled by norms and standards rather than guided and fulfilled by 
sincere hopes and expectations. The globalization of modernist literature, in expanding the number 
of competing authorities and encouraging the readers all over the world to reflect on their own 
experience while reading about the lives of fictional characters, has reinforced the idea that no 
particular tradition can be accepted as universal and unquestionable. 
In fact, experimenting with language and breaking the traditions were typical characteristics of 
modernist literature. Vision and viewpoint became an essential aspect of the modernist novel as 
well. Modernist writers were supposed to create something new and attractive instead of simply 
employing an objective one-dimensional third-person narrative and portraying everything from the 
single perspective. As the theorist Robin Walz argues in his study, in modernist literature, “a high 
value is placed upon innovation and novelty, to make new art that transcends contemporary life and 
elevates the viewer, reader, or audience above the mundane”. (2008: 9) Thus, it is possible to claim 
that the way the story was told became more and more significant as it shaped the very essence of 
the story. Indeed, Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh complement Walz (1996:171) by saying that 
Henry James, William Faulkner, and many other modernist writers became popular among the 
readers mainly because they experimented with innovative fictional points of view. For instance, 
James often portrayed the fictional reality of his novels and short stories from a single character’s 
subjective viewpoint, while Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury (1929) logically divided the 

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narrative into four sections, each giving the viewpoint of a different character. In the theorists’ 
opinion, this was done purposefully, in order to give the reader different perspectives and 
evaluations of the same situation described.
Rice and Waugh develop their insights about the peculiarities of modernist literature and say 
that the famous Irish novelist and poet James Joyce also applied a number of technical innovations 
in his masterpieces and claimed that all these experiments were in a way the expression of the 
modernist novel that represents a break with the traditional naturalistic novels of the eighteenth and 
nineteenth centuries written by Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, 
and many other writers. Allen complements Rice and Waugh by saying that “even in James and 
Conrad, the novelist figured as reporter or historian, recounting a sequence of actions ended before 
the reader takes up the novel to read. But with Joyce, readers are at the cutting edge of the 
characters’ minds; we share the continuous present of their consciousness. There is, obviously, an 
immense gain in intimacy and immediacy”. (1954:214) Thus, as can be seen from the evidence 
above, Modernism was a revolt against traditional literary forms and subjects that manifested itself 
strongly after the destruction of the First World War changed human history and philosophy. As a 
result, the traditional norms and standards of arranging a literary work assumed a relatively 
coherent and stable social order that could not harmonize with inner world of human beings. 
Indeed, modernist novels and poetry had to be analyzed on the basis of new criteria, thus, a 
school of New Criticism was established in the United States, which aimed to deal with a range of 
modernist innovations in literature. For instance, the theorists Norman S. Greenfield and William 
Champlin (1965) state that the notion of epiphany, which can be defined as a moment in which a 
character suddenly sees the transcendent truth of a situation, gained much attention from the critics 
who sought to examine literary works and to clarify their insights. A remarkable part of linguists’ 
attention was paid to the innovative modernist manners of producing narrative with the help of the 
methods of Free Indirect Speech and Free Indirect Thought .To demonstrate this, let us consider the 
following example from Virginia Woolf’s modernist novel Mrs. Dalloway (1964):
(2) Now it was time to move and as a woman gathers her things together, her cloak, 
her gloves, her opera – glasses and gets up to go out of the theatre into the street, she